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Philips Dubai Lamps

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by El Dobro, Feb 7, 2021.

  1. El Dobro

    El Dobro A Member

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    The conversion came out to $4 and change for each bulb, but to them, my address didn't exist.
     
  2. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    The bulbs are also tailored for 230 V 50 Hz, no?
     
  3. Rmay635703

    Rmay635703 Senior Member

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    Easy to convert

    there is a YouTube video where an engineer tears down the Dubai lights to reverse engineer how they work.

    in effect they underdrive the leds with far less voltage than normal to achieve the high efficiency this requires far more leds in the same 60wt eq bulb.
    Also the base has different power elements and circuitry than normal

    They are actually surprisingly simple and could be rebuilt out of us sourced light components.
     
  4. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    I think you might be talking about the youtube video in post #1 of this thread. :)
     
  5. t_newt

    t_newt Active Member

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    If you watch the video you'll find out why they will likely not be reverse engineering these, nor are you likely to find them outside of Dubai, where they were special ordered. They are more expensive to make, and because they are over-designed, are likely to last a very, very long time, if not 'forever'. There is no incentive for a light bulb company to sell you a light bulb that lasts forever.

    Here's an article in the respected IEEE (electrical engineering society) magazine that describes the 'light bulb conspiracy'. Basically, the original filament lightbulbs were originally made to last much longer than the ones they sold later. The various light bulb companies worked together to make them with shorter lifetimes:

    Full Page Reload
     
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  6. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    true, but it actually seems brighter
     
  7. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    In which of those above-listed countries is your address located?

    My normal automatic log-in to Amazon-United States did not work for Amazon-United Arab Emirates. A manual log-in did work after additional authentication, but none of my lists or order history or browsing history carried over to the UAE site. I didn't try to see if they can ship anything else to me in the U.S.A.
     
  8. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    On second thought, it depends on the type of lamp.

    If it is an omni-directional type similar to the old fashioned incandescents, then that number of lumens is far short of being a 100W equivalent.

    But if it is a uni-directional type, e.g. flat flush-mount or panel that cast all their light down, not half of it up into the fixture as the old ones did, then it could well be as good or even better than 100W equivalent.

    A great feature of LEDs is that they don't waste half their light output in the wrong direction. Incandescents need reflectors behind them to reclaim this light and re-direct it to a useful direction, but the efficiency of the reflector is commonly quite variable, from good to terrible.
     
  9. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Fortunately, this industry-wide collusion ended at WWII, and has also been criminalized.

    I wish this article could have discussed how this conspiracy interplayed with the life expectancy vs energy efficiency tradeoffs of incandescent lamps, and what the end result was for overall consumer costs. This makes this case materially different from other cases of planned obsolescence.

    Among incandescents, longer life lamps run cooler, yellower, and less energy efficient than their 'standard life' cousins. So if a lamp's life is sufficiently long, its dimmer output will prompt a consumer to switch to the next higher wattage in order to get the desired light.

    If lamps were expensive compared to the energy they burn, then longer lamp life would be cheaper over the full life cycle. But the last time I bought regular incandescent lamps, they cost somewhere around $0.25/unit in good sized multipacks on sale, but burned $3 to $5 worth of energy over their life. And back then electricity was still significantly cheaper here than the national average. So the lamps themselves are nearly free, their real cost was in the energy burned during their short life ...

    ... or sometimes, in the labor cost of replacement in the few hard to reach fixtures. Long life lamps were cost effective only in difficult to replace locations, otherwise the better energy efficiency of standard units outweighed replacement cost.

    The builder / original occupant of my house filled the bathroom vanities with 130V lamps, which many people knew produced longer life than the usual 120V units. (They were also very useful for certain parts of Snohomish County, where the PUD had been running a high voltage since nearly forever. 120V lamps didn't last long enough. But they couldn't easily drop the voltage without running into very stiff political opposition from old timers who didn't really understand the difference between 'current' and 'power'.) These were on the dim and yellowish side, so I intended to replace them with standard units when they burned out. But they never did burn out. So after a decade of suffering through them, I decided that they had been there long enough, and swept them all out.

    Sometimes it is actually cheaper to replace something that isn't broken, when its operating cost is too high.
     
    #29 fuzzy1, Feb 19, 2021
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2021
  10. RobAustin

    RobAustin Member

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